Reflection on The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas

               This classic book, first published in 1947, brought the Everglades into national public consciousness. It has a particularly beautiful beginning, as Douglas writes that, “There are no other Everglades in the world.” She goes on to describe their majestic beauty, plant and animal life, and importance as an ecosystem in the first chapter. Throughout the rest of the book, she tells us their history and explains the importance of the Indians and Europeans that battled over it and the Americans who moved in. When she wrote the book, Miami had not yet become the capital of Latin America. The final chapter is a call to action to protect this incredibly unique and valuable region.

               “The surface rock below the Everglades dips south at an incline of half a mile every six miles,” and is like a sort of spoon entering a cup of coffee. As the spoon enters, it fills with coffee. You can hold it so that just the rim of the spoon is visible, as the liquid is held by only three sides, joining with the rest of the cup on the fourth side. That’s sort of what the Everglades is like, but the liquid is moving, very slowly, but moving at a pace of one mile own for every 12 miles south-southwest.

               The people who lived in the Everglades were the Timucuans in the north, near Tampa; The Mayaimis lived near Lake Okeechobee; The Tekestas also lived in the area south of Okeechobee. The Calusas or Caloosas dominated the rich river of grass further to the south. However, all these peoples were killed off by Europeans and disease in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries. By the end of the 18^th century and beginning of the 19^th, groups facing pressure from the north in what is now Georgia and Alabama moved south to evade the white man. There were two linguistic groups that moved south: Muskogee-speakers, dominated by the Creeks who had crossed the Mississippi from the west, and Hithiti-speakers, the most important of which was the Mikasuki or Miccosukee. “Okeechobee” is a Hitchiti word, replacing the old name for the lake, which was “Mayaimi.” The Seminoles, whose name might be derived from “cimarron,” a Spanish word for runaway or escaped slave (due to Seminole acceptance of the runaways from the north), emerged as a group from the Muskogee-speakers, arriving from the northeast, led by a chief named Chipacasi or Se-pe-coffee. The city of Tallahassee is named after the Talasis, a Muskogee-speaking tribe. There were about 80 villages of Indians living in South Florida.

               In 1835, facing encroaching Americans and troops sent by the federal government to seize their lands, the Seminoles, led by Osceola, went to war with the United States, using a strategy of guerrilla warfare. They managed to keep the federal troops at bay and preserved their lands in the Everglades for a time. It was during this war that Seminoles massacred Major Francis L. Dade and his men in December 1835, shortly before the introduction of a new county to Florida, named “Dade” in his honor. Osceola was betrayed and taken prisoner in 1837, dying in chains as a symbol of Seminole resistance. The war dragged on until February of 1842, resulting in 3,930 Indians shipped to Arkansas (and later to Oklahoma) and 1,555 men dead in the US Army and Navy. Douglas does not tell us the Seminole casualty count except to say that it was “greater than that.” The war cost the US government 40 million dollars.

               Florida was slowly coming under control of the US government as Indian populations continued to wane. In 1845, Florida was made a state, a slave state to balance the free state of Iowa. And in that very year the new state legislature urged Congress to “examine and survey the Everglades, with a view to their reclamation,” meaning drainage. The problem with drainage is that the Everglades ecosystem already has its own drainage. It flows out to the southwest nice and slow. The canals that would eventually be built by destroying rock surfaces in the east and west coasts would mean saltwater infiltration, as the fresh water could not push it out from all sides. Plus, as long as rain kept coming (and it would), water would need to keep being pumped out. Okeechobee naturally flooded, feeding the Everglades with water, so they needed to build a dike, however, the one that would be completed in the 1910s war breached in hurricanes in 1926 and 1928, killing thousands because it held back water to lead to a bigger flood when breached. Apparently, the Indians of the Everglades had built ancient canals, but Douglas does not mention much more information about these but to say that they existed. All of these drainage projects were to have negative impacts on the Everglades ecosystem. It was only five years after statehood in 1850 that the state passed the Swamp Lands Act, designed to secure lands for drainage and reclamation and to create the Board of Internal Improvement, which would oversee the development of these public lands.

               By the turn of the century, the South Florida area was developing more to the east of what would become the I-95 corridor. The farmer William Brickell donated land to create streets in Miami and Julia Tuttle showed Henry Flagler that Miami was below the “frost line,” meaning that oranges could still grow that far south even during a frost. Flagler built his railroad to Miami and eventually all the way to Key West, with the Key West portion lasting until the Labor Day Hurricane of 1926 destroyed it. The real estate speculator R.P. Davie bought “25,000 acres of black muck” in what is now the town of Davie and sold it at $30 an acre, having only paid $2 an acre for it. It was a bad investment, as the Florida real estate market crashed shortly thereafter. But in spite of the busts, Florida kept growing, and While Douglas didn’t know it as she wrote the book in 1947, but the biggest times of growth were yet to come in the years after World War 2.

               To end the book, Douglas tells us how good it is that Everglades National Park was created. She tells us that we must protect this unique and special ecosystem, and she certainly did, speaking out in 1979 against the construction of an airport in the middle of the Everglades when she was 89 years old. She lived to be 108 and is certainly a Floridian hero. This is a really cool book (except for one part where she goes into some racist pseudo-science about native Americans) and I would recommend. To end, here is a quote from a man who lived in the Everglades and hunted there:

“When I was trying to sleep in that thick swamp I would often hear strange noises of birds and some coons and other screams which might have been panthers but I had no gun and felt perfectly safe as if home. The hoot owl was great company; he would scream out in the dead silent hours and almost made one shiver to think what fine agreeable neighbors he had. I very rarely saw a rattle snake. I killed a few, just for meanness, when I was about the age of twenty, and used to carry one or two of those rattlers’ fangs in my pocket to pick my teeth with; but thank the Lord, I have no teeth now.”